Day-case surgery is rapidly expanding throughout the Western world. This expansion is primarily the result of financial pressure from health care administrators, and many surgeons and anaesthetists have been reluctant to become involved in this type of practice. A series of helpful reports have appeared in the UK which give pointers to those trying to improve their throughput of such work, both for adult and paediatric day-care. Much research is currently underway in this field as anaesthetists try to decrease the morbidity of increasingly complex surgery for day-care. Interesting avenues are in geriatric care, preoperative and outcome assessment, recovery from anaesthesia and perioperative fluid therapy. Propofol is proving to be the drug of choice for the majority of day anaesthesia, but some adverse phenomena have been reported and more time will be needed to fully evaluate its place. More extensive audit of day-care work is urgently needed to provide information for future treatment plans. Nausea and vomiting remain as some of the worst after effects of anaesthesia. Despite a wide variety of anti-emetic drugs these symptoms are poorly controlled. Acupuncture and acupressure are proving to be interesting lines of research while other investigators continue to introduce newer drugs such as alizapride and dixyrazine. Other possible research areas include the use of traditional herbal remedies such as ginger root. Work on the history of anaesthesia continues to appear in a few of the mainstream anaesthetic journals. The majority of this work is on the historical use of specific drugs like muscle relaxants, the evolution of specific items of apparatus, or the life histories of noteable pioneers. Anaesthetic historians need to develop greater appreciation of the wider social, political and economic forces that were moulding the lives and researches of their topics. Editors of journals should be encouraged to publish more historical work.